Overview

An exotic and ambitious collection in which deceptively simple structures are built to carry an impressive weight of interest and reference. – Andrew Motion The guardian spirit of this book is a mahogany sculpture called Eve, part of the permanent collection in the Graves Art Gallery in Sheffield. She’s looking over her shoulder. Her gaze takes in journeys across the Atlantic, beaches in the Caribbean, a boarding school in Yorkshire, departures and arrivals, home- comings, a grandmother buried in Port of Spain, two brothers on the Orinoco, Hindu gods and goddesses, runaways, castaways, slaves, a cartographer who never leaves his room, mothers and sons, fathers and sons, and a goat pulling a bishop on a sledge… Alan Payne’s poems are rooted in the Caribbean, evoking a sense of separation and loss, and touch on the contradictions and betrayals of colonialism.

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9781914914829

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Alan Payne was born in Point-à-Pierre, in the south of Trinidad; and has childhood memories of Grenada, Trinidad and Guyana. He came to England when he was nine, crossing the Atlantic on a French liner and arriving in Plymouth. After studying English at Durham University, he taught in secondary schools in Leicestershire; then moved to Sheffield, doing various jobs before returning to teaching. For twenty years, he taught in an infant school, where he shared his enthusiasm for poetry, story-telling and drama with the children. Since retiring he has visited the Caribbean with his wife – but now feels that Yorkshire is his home. In 2003 Alan won second place in the Hilda Cotterill Poetry Prize. He has had poems published in The North, Smiths Knoll and Scintilla; and in a variety of anthologies including Writing on Air (A BBC Anthology), The Sheffield Anthology: Poems from the City Imagined, The Animal Gaze: 14 line poems by 14 Sheffield poets and the art that inspired them, and Cast: The Poetry Business Book of New Contemporary Poets. A few of his poems appear in WRITE Where We Are NOW, an on-line collection of poems written in the early period of the coronavirus pandemic, curated by Carol Ann Duffy and the Manchester Writing School. His pamphlet, Exploring the Orinoco, was a winner in the 2009/10 Poetry Business Competition. Mahogany Eve is his first full-length collection.

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